Testnet 1, the first Streamr 1.0 incentivised testnet, goes live in just under 1 week! It’s time to get prepared for the 5 million DATA tokens to be distributed to node Operators and Delegators over the course of these testnets. Here’s what you need to know!
Table of Contents
The 1.0 schedule (subject to change!)
- Streamr Hub 1.0 release – 28th November
- Testnet 1 – *5th December to 12th December – Reward pool: 1 million DATA
- Testnet 2 – 18th December to 8th January – Reward pool: 1.5 million DATA
- Testnet 3 – 15th January to 29th January – Reward pool: 2.5 million DATA
- 1.0 Release – February 2024
*Please note the change of testnet 1 start date by 24 hours (updated 3/12/24)
The testnets will evaluate the performance of the stream Sponsorship smart contracts. These contracts manage the distribution of earnings among a set of node Operators. Operators run Streamr nodes that join sponsored streams, aiding in relaying the traffic within them.
You can brush up on how it fits together in this blog.
Get your operators ready!
To earn your share of the 5 million DATA tokens, you’ll need to become an Operator or a Delegator.
The best earners are likely to be Operators capable of attracting the biggest delegations, so it will pay to have a great node running reputation among the DATA token holder community. You might even want to set up a website and X profile to show your Operator node performance to drive credibility and attract more delegators.
To earn rewards, an Operator’s nodes are expected to follow the protocol rule of properly forwarding messages to other connected nodes with good uptime and sufficient hardware resources to handle the traffic of the incentivized streams.
The amount of DATA tokens the Operator stakes on the Sponsorship determines the size of their share of the token flow. The Operator will generally stake on Sponsorships where they can earn the best available yield for their stake. Other Operators in a Sponsorship are there to share the cake, so overcrowded Sponsorships may not offer the best yields, and some Operators will decide to mine other Sponsorships instead.
Testnet 1 will have reduced slashing penalties. It will be 1% instead of 10%.
If you are running a node in the Mumbai testing environment, you should upgrade to the new testnet-one version of the node. It can be used to connect to Testnet 1 or the Mumbai testing environment. The active network depends on the node config. The Mumbai config is like before, while the Testnet config is much shorter. The older pretestnet releases should no longer be used.
For troubleshooting or to share your feedback, please join us on the Streamr Discord and use the #testnet-general🌐 channel. You can also keep an eye on the #testnet-announcements channel for future updates on all things testnet.
Brubeck rewards
Brubeck rewards will run up until the end of November, with distribution taking place normally on 1st December. After this, we are switching to the testnet distribution and then 1.0 in February. During 1st to 3rd December, you can move your tokens from Brubeck nodes to the newly created 1.0 Operators before the testnet incentives begin.
What’s so special about 1.0?
The 1.0 protocol upgrade will unlock peer-to-peer market forces between Sponsors and Operators of the Streamr Network so that robust distribution can be paid for with the currency of the Streamr Network—DATA.
The other huge part of the Streamr protocol upgrade is about unlocking any binary data traffic to propagate over the network, while at the same time replacing the Tracker nodes with a Distributed Hash Table (DHT), maintained by the peers of the Network.
The big picture is that 1.0 marks the culmination of the 2017 roadmap, and means the Streamr Network is fully decentralized, production-ready and complete!
On Thursday 30th November we held an AMA on Twitter Spaces on the testnets and 1.0.
A note on safety during the testnets
Please be aware of some important safety tips during the 1.0 testnets:
- Consider starting small with your stake amount during the testnets and use common sense to never stake more than you can afford to lose. A professional audit of the incentive layer has been completed by Cyfrin, but nothing can be guaranteed of course.
- If you want to stake on a sponsorship, DO NOT click on the “Sponsor”. That’s for funding the sponsorship, not staking! Instead, go to the sponsorship you want to stake on (such as the easter egg video stream sponsorship) and click “Join as an operator” and enter the amount.
- There may be an increase in activity by scammers during the testnets. A common approach is to pretend to offer help or tech support in direct messages (something we never do). It’s advised you disable DMs on Discord. More tips can be found in #server-safety-guide.
Thanks for reading and happy testing!
